London Grip New Poetry – Autumn 2025

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ISSUE 57 of LONDON GRIP NEW POETRY features poems by:
* Alex Saynor * Myra Schneider *Stuart Pickford *Kenneth Pobo
*Philip Dunkerley *S C Flynn *Tim Waller *Anne Ryland
*Jenny Hockey *Anna Bowles *Pam Thompson *Glen Hunting
*Maggie Freeman *Peter Daniels *Ger Duffy *Antony Mair
*Mary Mulholland *Lesley Saunders *Judith Wozniak *Michael O’Brien
*Prue King *Julia Vaughan *Thomas Ovans *Claudia Daventry
*Louise Worthington *Tim Cunningham *Kathleen Gray *B. Anne Adriaens
*Pat Marum *Lee Fraser *Tony Beyer *Anthony Wilson
*Caleb Murdock *Wendy Klein *Shey Marque *Annie Wright
*Rowan Tate *Nancy Mattson *Fiona Clark *Cathra Kelliher
*Kathleen McPhilemy *David Goldstein
Contributor Biographies and Editor’s Notes are also included.
Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors
A printable version of this issue can be found at LG New Poetry Autumn 2025
London Grip New Poetry appears early in March, June, September & December
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:
Send up to THREE poems & a brief bio to poetry@londongrip.co.uk
Poems should be in a SINGLE Word attachment or included in the message body
Our submission windows are January, April, June & October
Please do not include us in simultaneous submissions

Editor’s notes
Contributions for this issue of London Grip New Poetry have spontaneously clustered around family matters, especially in relation to caring and communication across generations.  Thus Kenneth Pobo and S C Flynn are among several poets who write about the elderly being looked after or remembered by their grown-up children while others, such as Mary Mulholland and Lesley Saunders, give accounts of mid-life experiences, showing how we can delight or disappoint each other in our friendships and partnerships. Some – for instance Kathleen Gray and Lee Fraser – go further back in time and describe the thrills and puzzles encountered by parents of very young children.  We meet a stiff-upper-lip family portrayed by Maggie Freeman and a man with no family who is described by Alex Saynor.  

Within this mix of well-observed but fairly commonplace episodes there are some darker and less familiar ingredients. Louise Worthington’s perspective on the challenges of adoption (referenced in our cover picture) and Tim Cunningham’s righteously angry commemoration of abandoned and forgotten orphans can be seen as paving the way for a closing batch of fierce poems by Cathra Kelliher, David Goldstein et al which deal with the plight of children in Gaza and similar conflict zones.

It says a great deal for the quality and power of this quarter’s submissions that I found I was still being moved by these poems during the final round of proof-reading even though I had, by that time, read them many times before.  I hope they will have a similar and lasting effect on our readers.

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs
London Grip poetry editor
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Alex Saynor: Half a Thought for Hamish

Spare half a thought for Hamish McGinty,
his boots spattered by river mud,
geese and sea birds peppering his temporary table
under the sky’s off-white Sunday.

Spare half a thought for Hamish,
his grey and white head
smiling without direction.

Spare half a thought,
he thinks, if you can,
but for what?

Spare half a thought for Hamish McGinty:
those river walks he'll never vlog.
This is the man without subscribers.

Spare half a thought for Hamish,
caught between Mephistopheles 
and the raging salt chuck rails
of The White Stuff; half local,
half tourist – both parts mystified.

Spare half a thought when the dawn means nothing,
when you're clambering around sealed boxes
from the past on the lorry of the mind and heart.

Spare half a thought for Hamish McGinty.
He restrains himself from talking:
would do so if you asked him.

The mind isn't 'out there' for him yet
on communal pavements – you wouldn't mentally file him
as another babbling shipwreck.

Spare half a thought for Hamish
when he has no satellite pre-sets
or passengers for the road ahead.

Spare half a thought
as he gets up from the table
and over the bridge past Wren's hotel,
an ancient church and the reliable indefinable
grey and violet of the river.

Spare half a thought for Hamish.
No-one can search his catalogue of the present
from a distance and click some heart. Spare a thought.

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Myra Schneider: Getting the Jab

You stare at him standing on guard at the entrance to a passage,
mesmerised by the blue veins in his face and his long thin body. 
It’s clear he’s unfazed by his age as he orders some to queue, 
some to go back to the busy street and return later. He lets 
the stick-bound, of which you are one, sit on flimsy plastic chairs.  

Now and then, with a knowing smile, he beckons a fragile-
looking oldie to go into the darkness and before long
you are chosen. He points down the dark passageway 
and you follow it with your attendant to a small cave, aware
you’ve descended to the underworld, become a supplicant.

It’s easy to recognise Persephone but she’s lost her youth,
her beauty.  She’s barely as tall as you and her long dark hair
is now short and white as a winter field. Minions deliver 
phials and a scribe double-checks your name’s on her list. 
How nifty she is with the syringe. You barely feel the prick 

but you’ve no idea if she’s injecting a refined liquor of poppy seeds 
to bring instant death or a stimulant to renew strength. 
Rejoicing to find you’re still alive, you haul on your winter coat. 
She waves away your attendant and leads you outside,
saying she longs to stay in daylight and breathe fresh air.

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Stuart Pickford: Garden
 
Girls play pat-a-cake
by the brick Wall of Remembrance,
read a funny word, Covid.
Buried deep in their mobiles,
paramedics wired on espressos.
 
Benches with golden dedications
sit with broken slats.
Nettles have barged into beds.
In the old hospital carpark,
saplings can’t imagine shade.
 
Strapped in with a lap belt,
a man without legs scoots about,
drags on a crafty fag.
Nurses burst through doors,
divers coming up for air.
 
Whole generations of a family
perch on a picnic table.
A son feeds his mum
on titbits of bread, thinks
her drawn face is a bird’s.
 
A cheeky monkey seagull
teases for a game of Dares.
Squawks. Ambulances unload
their glass cargoes. The sky
plays its hand: stick
 
or twist? Hydrangeas have found
the colour chart for blue.
A terrier acts the fool.
Roses let go of their petals,
their memory covers the ground.

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Kenneth Pobo: Hospital Parking Lot

After I visit my dad, 
I find my car.
I can see the exit,
turn the wrong way, 
and end up in a loop.  
Three times I ride in 
these circles, think of waves 
that could drown me.  

A cold day.  Marianne Faithfull 
sings “Wrong Road Again.”    
Marianne often has 
the right song at the right time.  
Or wrong time.  A bearded man 
walks nearby, tells me how 
to escape.  Three dollars lighter, 

I’m driving home.  The bleak sky 
looks like someone trying to do 
push-ups with a broken arm.

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Philip Dunkerley: Afternoon Outing

Was it pride, or guilt, or love?
Something more than her feeble body
was there as I pushed her along 
in the wheelchair.

Pride in how I handled the thing,
guilt that perhaps I didn’t do enough for her,
love — an instinctual love for each other,
a charge on us both.

All my experience of baby-buggies, 
so long ago; I nursed them up
and down kerbs, buoyed by the hopes
of my children’s futures.

Now, the carer of my own mother,
feigning cheerfulness I steered her
towards the Memorial Park,
the bright flowers, and our long goodbye.

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S C Flynn: Regime Change
In memory of my mother

For the stars in your mind to go dark one by one 
was cruel and inexplicable,
but consciousness is only a screensaver
while death is a cold, severe friend
always waiting to show his loyalty;
whatever we think we know about it
is articulate disinformation
written by chatbots over centuries
to seem convincing, every idea
another drone fallen in the sea.
Algorithms that reward aggression and anger
rule our lives, but you were a traveller
who serenely passed it all by while winning
the battle between time and eternity.

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Tim Waller: Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers
 
In the attic of my boyhood home, the new owner
finds hidden under half-rotted floorboards
two safe deposit keys from First National,
Mom's black clutch she bought for a dollar,
the one she swore the night nurse stole,
sepia snapshots of her Irish grandfather,
postcards rubber-banded, read and reread, 
from a man whose name I don’t recognize,
a diary with a column of dates and sums,
in her difficult-to-read right hand slant –
a newspaper clipping of my brother’s drowning,
along with his fifth-grade school day picture,
a rodent-chewed $1000 banknote, circa 1952,
housed in an envelope labeled, insurance money.

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Anne Ryland: Running Past the Burnt House 

I don’t want to be the woman
who stops to gawp at a collapsed
roof and charcoal-pink stone,
who snoops like a looter 
in scorched rooms torn open.
Not far away must be the widow –
coming home to a ruin, 
she crumpled, howled.
What set off the fire – 
a mass of candles, an over-stuffed 
loft, or was there, hidden
in some wrack of cables, a fault?
That spark: just that. 
Last gasps of smoke – 
my father’s usual mutter 
Hope the old girl was insured 
as he sniffs soot and dust,
coughs up the memory 
of his blackened terrace,
rubble, how it merged
into a hand-coloured purple ridge 
of the London Bomb Damage Map: 
‘beyond repair’. 
A burnt house is forever burnt. 
And though I know danger
isn’t contagious, I run a little faster.

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Jenny Hockey: Just as easily not

My inbox unfolds across the empty screen 
and here’s Olenka, posting from our old home. 
I found a mural, she says, under the wallpaper 
on the stairs — and now she’s unearthed
my email address, but just as easily not.

She wants to show me the towering stripes 
and swirls, a Michaelangelo feat —
achieved when meat and sugar and cheese  
were scarce, when sirens ripped 
the blanket of night. 

I see them both on the stairs, paintbrushes 
taped, no tied onto brooms, their aching backs 
and wrists, dreadfully fearful of drips. 
Mum in her twenties, single still, Grandad 
fifty at most. They’re making a home together 
after dodging the London bombs, 
hoping for safety in the Fens.

I picture a bus pulling in, Green End Road,
the final stop, a uniformed man stepping down
with an invitation to tea, a man who’ll fall in love 
before the day is out, who’ll climb our stairs 

for sixty years. But just as easily not,
like the bombs and the move to the Fens, 
the invitation to tea, a bus not breaking down 
that day and later a meeting of restless cells 
taking their chance to become —

then Olenka moving in, 
finding their brush marks on the wall, 
tracing my whereabouts.

She wants me to visit, wants to bring
this tale to a close — but Putin’s at large 
in her homeland again 

and she vanishes into my screen.

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Anna Bowles: The Good Day

My dear, come back with me, to February
the twenty-third, the last day of summer.
Your final stroll through orangery blooms
so pure I scented them through Telegram.

That night there was still time. The ravens’ wings 
were lightly bound. In the warm screen light 
we held breaths… It’s not close. It’s not yet.
 
A thousand miles apart 
we sat blindfold on the precipice
and dandled our sweet pink February toes
over the howitzer’s maw.

I am letting go, you said, of thinking about any future at all,
considering the circumstances.

You woke to forty messages. I did not sleep.

When I let go of your hand at last you fell quietly,
not trying to look back.

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Pam Thompson: Leaving No 77

The vans arrive
before we finish packing boxes 
in the spare bedroom. 

We can’t remember where 
we’ve put the child seat
but why we want it is a mystery –
she left home years ago.

I’m certain I took down all the curtains, 
but there they are, up again, looking 
just-bought-and-ironed 

Why are you wearing
the suit you bought for our wedding?

We have to go – our new house is waiting. 

We nearly collide with two
removal men on the stairs.
They walk straight through us.


Pam Thompson: Exit Strategy

We’re scripted – Celia says that she’ll be sorry 
to see me go but there are ways of reflecting on 
and exiting from our sessions – via a phone call, 

Zoom or face-to-face. We can review the notes
and diagrams. I could do a drawing or share a story or a poem –
we didn’t have to do very much at all but there had to be 

a last session. Celia, small, immaculate, correct 
and professional. It’s a bit much, driving across town 
on a Monday morning, and all those cancer leaflets on display 

are triggering. Celia says it is important to be faced 
with reality. I didn’t want to revisit my childhood though
no doubt it might be revealing. And there was no point 

asking what my husband and daughter thought about this 
and that because it was me in the room and not them. 
I welcomed the calm: the gold settee, the comforting rug,

the water, the tissues, Celia’s compassion. Saying more
would probably have been too much disclosure. I hate 
goodbyes. There should be rituals. Celia has the script.

I choose a poem and read it over Zoom – Emily, ‘I dwell
In possibility’, because I do.  Celia finds it moving
and feels quite upset (is this transference?) I say I’ll send it.

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Glen Hunting: Gift Wrapping

I read my diary aloud to my therapist. She says 
she burned her own diaries years ago. 

She imagines I’m locked in a sound-proof room, 
bouncing verbal parcels off the walls to myself.

When I’m in her room, my parcels often burst 
like soft fruit, leaving a stain I can’t clean off. 

My thoughts need theories to justify themselves, 
but she says the wrapping warps the gifts inside.

I told her about a writing retreat on Rhodes 
later this year—twelve places, open to anyone,

and this is the last time it will ever be offered. 
She said it would do me good if I can afford it.

But can I encourage the warmth that blesses
strangers when they’re randomly assembled?

Can the dusty terraces bleach me clean,
perched on morning cliffs, surrounded by blue?

She smiles, shakes her head. But not unkindly. 
I’m weaving another chrysalis like a straitjacket.

If I can wriggle free, I should get myself a passport 
and book the flights. But not because my therapist 

and I believe in fate or just desserts.
I only want her to think that I’m not afraid.
.

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Maggie Freeman: Her first passport

And here is her photograph. A small rectangle
of black and white that commemorates
the nine-year-old perched on the cusp 
of a changed life: short-sleeved white school shirt
striped tie in which the colours have run:
very skinny, her straight blond hair made thin
by her belonging to the island; unless the warring 
between her parents caused it, she was always
an over-sensitive child – so travel-averse
she’d run a high temperature just visiting the Charleses
in the rainforest beyond Scarborough.

And here she is opening her passport 
to the official at the small airport with whose son
she goes to school – but in faraway England 
home of learning, and three flights away
she will go to a new school where for two terms
she will weep in the playground every lunchtime – 
but just now her five-year-old sister’s being sick
and her mother’s weighed down by abandoning the way 
of life and the man she still loves, and is struggling 
with the great suitcase that holds the futures
of the three of them. So she has to manage.

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Peter Daniels: Flight

Grounded for no reason other than no reasons to fly,
I consider why I like flight but not the rest of flying 
– all the waiting before security, waiting for the gate,
waiting at the gate, and waiting before takeoff 
in the shuffle of passengers handling hand-luggage 
into the overhead bins, and standing waiting again
to emerge from the fuselage, lining up before the desks 
of officials, and gathering round the ride of the suitcases – 
but flight: especially coming home towards the end of it, 
looking down where the land gets more real through wisps 
of cloud, the unofficial flypast over Windsor Castle, and
the expanses of water glittering in shapes, and the long
turn over the city itself, always at an angle that’s not
quite like the map – suddenly there’s a street pattern 
so familiar, is that my house down there? – but the river
always itself in its famous twists as we curve round
into the float downwards, which to those below is a roar,
over Kew Gardens and my aunt’s flat, past my mother’s
birthplace, and making the bump onto the level ground.

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Ger Duffy: The Patient

That morning, I decided to cancel my flight and stay.  Tom said 
the toddler was getting in the way and, as John was coming, 
I should leave.  The cleaning lady looked at the patient and said 
it was no joke being her.  I agreed. There was only one photograph 
of us together, both of us with our backs to the camera, her arm 
around my waist. I think I remember that day, it was one day 
out of many, so I guess I don’t, but I do remember the swimsuit I wore, 
it was a hand me down, yellowish with small, puckered stitches 
that itched my skin like a Brillo pad.  John arrived at lunchtime,
I told him the palatable version of possible outcomes, he ran out 
the door he had just come in.  I left on the 4 o’clock train with the toddler.  
All my life I wanted to feel whole and solid like a cake of edam cheese,
but that day I was shredded mozzarella.  When I found out 
what happened to the patient, I tried to forgive Tom, I tried.

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Antony Mair: Belonging
For my goddaughter

Say “Scheveningen”, Johannes said,
as he drew the beer and watched the froth
climb up the glass.  A rasp of consonants
under his handlebar moustache, the first e narrowed
by his lifted tongue.  It was how they found out Germans
in the War. The man beside me said
We’re all friends now.  Welcome to Amsterdam.

Back in London, it’s Choucroute à l’Alsacienne at the Delaunay,
and you’re waving cutlery while talking. 
But all I hear is my father’s voice
– Keep your knife and fork
close to the plate, you’re not 
conducting an orchestra.
It’s Saturday night, and the capital's élite
push past the liveried doorman
to join the chosen at the crowded tables.
For them and you the world’s still new and brave,
but one day, when a sleeve discreetly covers
the faded riot of flowers now glaring on your upper arm
you too will sit opposite one younger, 
and wonder when tattoos became a sign of age, 
or how you’re exiled 
in a land you thought was yours. 

Like that Polari you English used, Johannes said. 
Not that I would know.  He winked.
We recognise our own, though even 
women come here now, and in the summer
half the Ruhr’s at Scheveningen.

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Mary Mulholland: Why some rifts heal

No answer. Yet they invited me for lunch and it’s after one. On the lintel is engraved 1720. I push open the door. A black dog wags its tail, a tulip hound from an early Dutch painting. Hello? It’s been, what, twelve years? The hall is lined with prints of killing, taxidermy, antlers. Hello? In the kitchen, the aga heats this cool August day. The dog follows. Hello, I call down the backstairs to the courtyard. Hens strut over flagstones, horses look out from stables and nod. A quad, a barrow of hay, a tack room ajar. Hello? The bay kicks its door, I pause by the grey, it nuzzles my neck, honey-horse breath warm in my ear, then I wander to the garden, hello? A tractor by a felled pine, distant Malvern hills.

A rabbit darts off. On the terrace, silver balloons, spell Hppy Brthday. A bow and arrow, a water gun. She’s a grandmother now. And I’m back at her son’s sixth birthday when we became friends. Before our divorces, her ex-husband’s suicide, her painting, my poetry, and that holiday in Kerala after which we stopped speaking for years. Then out of the blue, she rang. How a friendship can return, and a rift which once seemed so vast is erased. Like a new bridge reconnecting dark and sunny sides of a gorge. A decision to pick up a phone. As random as my choice of route to get here. Rocking on a hanging chair I smell cut grass, hear gunshot. Startled woodpigeons fly upwards. A hawkmoth hovers over black hellebore.

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Lesley Saunders: Tree, with Two Women
The two women referred to are Frida Kahlo and Sylvia Plath.

The tree, I noticed, had grown to fullness 
around an iron spike. Unable to walk away

it had encased the railing with living wood,
embracing the alien other in order to survive – 

self-portrait of the artist in a metal brace,
or the way the poet wrapped her milky body

around her steely will and laid it out cold
on the kitchen floor. It would have taken a lot 

of alcohol and lovers, several bottles of Seconal, 
a mighty fiesta skirt, just to try and draw breath

in the aftermath of bridegrooms and epithalamia.
The audacity of the eyebrows, the Aryan eye bright blue, 

is what lasts, I notice, yes and the ferocious capacity
to be wounded, larger even than life itself.

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Judith Wozniak: Man Up

Here they come in their hard hats,
ear defenders, leather knee pads,
pull their gear from a caged lorry.
The boss with his weathered face
rippling biceps, a tidemark where
tanned skin meets rolled up sleeves.
They drink three-teabag tea, thick
with sugar, hoover up biscuits.
Only the new lad stands back.
They tease him when he asks
for squash. His body is a temple, love.
Dan clips on his harness ready to be
hoisted into the crown of the beech,
disappears in a rustle of branches.
Throw me smokes up mate
– I don’t think so mate.
His chainsaw growls into action.
On the ground the boss kick-starts
the wood chipper, like the amp pedal
in a rock gig, shouts over the grind.
The tattooed boy is edgy, gaunt.
At snap time, he eats lentil salad
from Tupperware. He tells the men
he’s spotted a nest in the next tree.
Good lad, we’ll leave that bit.

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Michael O’Brien: All the Pretty Dying  

Giant bony hands.
Reaching upwards.
Slowly being ungloved.
To be so pretty yet dying is so odd

Autumnal tones defy category.
The sun will pick one tree.
It will glow.
The sweet melody of this
rusted muted canopy.

Winter awaits
With a cold, cold fate:
To slowly disintegrate
Useless, brittle, 
and huddled on the ground.

A skeletal landscape rises
I miss the pretty dying.

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Prue King: sap

tears weep down
the rough exterior
of a thick skinned palm
sap seeping from
the felled invader’s stump

			                     no more seeds

wearily grandad puts down his rake
driblets leaking through the crannies  
of his gnarled face 
overflowing like the palm fronds
on his rusted wheelbarrow

			                  his heartwood knows
			                  he’ll not see a mature tree
			                  in the void

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Julia Vaughan: Gran’s Pedicure

As I cut my toe nails
I see Gran's feet
My toes are going wayward
Spreading, just like hers
My little toes folding under
With little humpy nails
Just like hers

I cut her nails sometimes
Playing chiropodist
Full of teenager swagger
I wish I had done more
She deserved more
I've since learnt about massage
Reflexology, essential oils
And sapphire nail files

Gran had arthritis, pain a
Constant companion
I have Gran's feet
Wonky, bent, gnarled
Old feet, often aching
Arthritis creeping in
I had no idea how much
Gran would've loved
A warm foot spa

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***

Thomas Ovans: Who do we think you are?

By forty Eric was the image of his father
but while Mary always had her mother’s voice
she didn’t get her shock of wild white hair
till she arrived at sixty-five. 

                                                Conversely,
Arthur throughout all his middle years
looked much the same as when he started school
(where copying off others never tempted him).

Jack, a teenage nephew, last seen as a toddler, 
shocked me when he smiled his mother’s smile
as we gathered for her funeral.

Now and then a likeness skips a generation. 
We all agree that Emma gets her striking features
from her grandma.  For a while her grandad
almost couldn’t bear to look at her.

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***

Claudia Daventry: Never

When children start to talk about inheritance
and they mean bricks and mortar, and you
can only think of the old king, and the treachery
of Goneril, in particular, and how your eldest
banged her spoon on the table, or tugged
the cat’s tail and you wonder how we lose sight
of the dew on the grass at dawn, the blackbird
singing from the top of the silver birch, the scent
of lilacs on a wet morning in May, the sobriety
of the first cup of black coffee that kick-starts 

the day. And you reflect on your own dead mother,
your father who long ago left the conversation, 
how they never spoke of who would be in line
for what, but focused on tuning the piano,
paying the plumber, who would wash up
that evening and whether we would/not afford
a summer holiday again that year, but a new
path, perhaps; never time to ruminate upon
who loved whom more, or more deserved what,
and now it is age, and ownership, which hurt,

that no sooner do you acquire than you regret
the loss that must one day come, the bitter
drop rising in the family chalice; the need
to protect all you made and tended – yet this
we know to be impossible: that there is no
control over the uncontrollable, whether
the love that binds us may remain, the view
from your window stay clear, whether the roof
over your head will forever keep out the rain
and if the children will stay true

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***

Louise Worthington: Red Telephone Boxes

Libby’s birth mother manifests in glass and steel,
In red boxes standing sentinel by roadsides,
Where memory bleeds into countryside.
These vessels wait for voices never coming,
Their hollow chambers echo with absence.
Inside, phones ripped from their metal wombs,
Umbilical cords severed, connections lost—
Yet still they stand, vermilion monuments
To all that has been taken, all that remains.

They rise when least expected—
when Libby smiles at something new,
When you've finally dried her tears,
when you've shown her how to tie her shoes,
When for one brief moment you forget
that you are not her first mother—
Then suddenly—
there it stands—
scarlet against green fields—
A phantom ringing with silent bells.

Dust-filled chambers where spiders weave,
Glass-walled crypts where memories grieve.
These tombs of lost conversations
Rise from earth's dark foundations,
Resurrecting ghosts you cannot see,
Un-cremating what was meant to be.

Does Libby speak in rivers and in floods
Because somewhere deep within her blood
She hears a voice she cannot place or name?
A mother's call no stranger can reclaim?

Sometimes your foot presses the pedal down—
You blur the red boxes into streaks of flame.
Sometimes you stop and stare at what they hold—
Once finding books abandoned on their shelves,
You took one—not to read but to possess—
A Christian text you'd never open wide,
The taking was revenge, the keeping, pride.

Another time—a defibrillator hanging there—
Meant to restart hearts, to shock life back—
The irony not lost as you turned away,
Ashamed of hoping no one needs saving today.

Sometimes you dream of metal crushed by metal,
Of empty cars colliding with these sentries,
Of glass explosions scattering like stars,
Of silence finally complete and whole.
But mostly, they endure, unbowed by time,
Tall and red, shameless in neglect,
Unbroken by their brokenness,
Witnesses to what cannot be changed.

You hate them for their honesty,
Their unrelenting, silent testimony:
That Libby will forever strain to hear
What time and law have placed beyond her reach—
Her fingers reaching for a phantom line,
Her heart still listening for a voice
That will not call, that cannot speak, that never answers.

The cord is cut. The phone is gone. The box remains.

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***

Tim Cunningham: The Bones Remember
‘Suffer us children that carry this cross.
Suffer us children that Ireland forgot.’
Michael Hassion, Tuam Baby Home Survivor

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwqnwrkd1go

 
Bones do not remember
The moment’s fleeting pleasure
Or the cruel hour’s rape
Before calcium shaped them
Like Michelangelo’s Carrara marble
Finding its form,
Before emerging from the soft walls of the womb
To  the concrete reality
Of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home.
 
Today my name is ‘One of the 796’.
But I hope to see that refined.
The hoardings are erected.
The excavations have begun.
The infant bones are being recovered
From the defunct sewage facility.
 
In time, families will come forward.
Hopefully, mine will come early,
Their DNA will find a match
And I will have a name.
While I wait, I rehearse my too brief history.
The bones remember.
 
I recall a cold, loveless place
Surrounded by beautiful gardens,
Cots in vast, draughty rooms,
Children like chickens in a coop,
Toddlers shouting, screeching,
Babbling a language of their own,
Always soiling, bedlam.
 
And there were incidents.
My two friends not meeting at the ten foot wall,
Just disappeared.
Then a beautiful woman with the saddest smile
Who cut a lock of my hair and was gone.
 
Epidemics, like starving jackals,
Prowled the rooms:
Measles, whooping cough,
Anything contagious.
And no antibiotics
To scare them off.
 
How quickly those ladders of siege,
Hunger and neglect,
Allied with the slings and arrows of disease,
Stormed my citadel.
 
On waving my white flag,
I was swaddled in white linen
And taken through a tunnel,
Its ceiling too low to be a catacomb
But high enough for a boatman
To row across the Styx,
By a holy nun who threw me in the cesspit
While praying for my soul,
A cesspit crammed with tiny bones.
 
The friends who failed to meet me at the wall
Called out.  So their citadels had also been taken.
And before mine.
‘De Profundis’ our soundtrack,
We too cry out from the depths,
The depths of a Tuam cesspit.
 
And the truth will not stay buried.
I am the echo of a silent history.
There are seven hundred and ninety-five others;
All our bones with secrets about to be exhumed,
All anticipating
When ‘De Profundis’ will be muted
And ‘In Paradisum’ sing out its joy.

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***

Kathleen Gray: Night ride

Sky an inky blue curtain 
sprinkled with brilliant stars

brother at the wheel, wife beside him
Leonard Cohen on the playlist

niece asleep on my shoulder 
son wide awake, attentive	

excited by the novelty
of being out so late.

Mummy? He looks up at me 
that earnest look when he has 

something important to say:
I just talked to God – 

it’s the first time 
I’ve ever talked to him.

Did he answer? I ask.
Yes, he says, but not in words.

I gave up on religion years ago, 
never taught him to pray – 

the stern God of my childhood
was never up for a chat.


Kathleen Gray: Lost in translation 

The fridge is mewling
     like the cat 

          a plaintive whine           
               I can’t interpret

I take good care of them
     keep them supplied
              
           with food and drink
                clean up their mess
  
Don’t know what ails them – 
     the cat’s refusing 

          to get involved, like my      
               husband, who leaves me 

to deal with fridge, cat,       
     and our infant son             

          whose fretful crying
               I can’t decipher either.

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***

B. Anne Adriaens: One child developed feline empathy

She saw him do it 
whenever the cat had done 
something wrong. 
She saw him grab the cat 
by the neck fur, hold it down 
and rub its nose in what made him cross.

Still small enough 
to squeeze under the low table 
where the cat often slept, 
she understood its need 
to not be seen.

And she understood his need for 
the warmth of a small body on his lap, 
silent except for a purr.
She understood when,

hand heavy on her neck, he pushed 
until her face was an inch from the jumble of toys, 
until she complied with his need for tidiness. 

She also understood the cat 
was way more forgiving than she could ever be.

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***

Pat Marum: Fire

A room with a bed. You are two, your sister 
has just been born. She is wrapped up now 
with your mother in the bed. You are told
to get in with them. You don’t want to, 
but your mother insists.

There is a fire. Your pyjamas are warmed 
before you put them on. They are stripy. 
You get into the place of knives, 
the disapproving face of the midwife.  
You pick up on her ire. The hiss of the fire.  


Pat Marum: Air

Stories. Breathed into the air: 
a step-grandfather, walking back, alone, 
from the pub late at night seeing 
a headless horseman on the curve 
of the bridge; a great-grandmother 

meeting the devil on the road; a tiny fairy 
with long blond hair, disentangling it 
with a huge comb, boys and girls 
running away; tales of stolen children, 
changelings. The banshee.
Earth

Wailing, wailing around the house, the mother,
her arms outstretched, wailing at windows 
at what God has done to her –
down into the grave her babies, her young husband, 
gone into the soil, gone into the earth, 
you have to bear your cross. 

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***

Lee Fraser: A Wail Weighs 

A wail weighs, makes marble of your heart;
the hounding sound around which you are tied.
Wage wordless war to wash unwanted hopes;
no mortal ear will hear your whorl described.

Those waves of waking whimpers wipe you out:
your mask is mashed, your mental mast kidnapped.
You wade in wax, a mangled marsh of risk,
the world a mottled maze, no mapping app.

You wander, wrangle, watch – a mathless blur,
imagine magic wand, remote control.
The waiting morphs your marrow into rock:
what ways a wail marks a mama’s soul.

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***

Tony Beyer: Bruegel’s vision

the noises children make while playing
are the beginning of poetry and fiction
in their later lives
of drama and its antidote

a song or a monster’s throaty roar
may anticipate adult 
happiness or fear
protagonist and antagonist

those cough-like gunshots
small boys utter
endorse a million movie frames
and millions of dead in many wars

the child with the official-sounding voice
who instructs all the others
is the one to watch out for
with trepidation 

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***

Anthony Wilson: Storage

Your fountain pen, 
your geometry set
could go missing.

Cigar boxes
from fathers
for storing it all.

Boys bent to worship
as they wrote,
inhaling slavery.

During Latin
rulers were discharged,
polished, realigned.

The empire
glowed pink
all around us.

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***

Caleb Murdock: A Dream at the Beach

While sleeping peacefully in the guest house
of a distant friend, I half-woke to the sound
of girls laughing, tittering—teen-aged girls
projecting all the judgemental pettiness
I have come to expect from some of them.

I do understand.  This is a man’s world.
Girls, once grown to teens, have figured that out,
so grab whatever power, influence, clout
is left to them, thereby transforming themselves
into things not every person can like.

There sounded to be four or five of them,
and they were nearby, almost in my head!
Their ethereal laughter was more like singing,
the cries of sirens pulling at my weak
body bound to the bed of my exhaustion.

Their laughing made it impossible to sleep,
so I resolved to get up and have my say.
I opened my eyes to a high-pitched whine
and was mystified to find myself at home,
not at the beach, and completely alone.

I realized my nose had been whistling while
I slept, and my brain, the good computer that
it is, had found my contempt, so turned the sound
to the babbling of spiteful girls, revealing
more of me to myself than I cared to see.

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***

Wendy Klein: Her Rainbow

She reads it first when she is 15 –
too young you might say,

but she fancies herself Ursula Brangwen,
the scars from her appendectomy

still raw in the full-length mirror,
when Ben, the melancholy airman

from the base where her mother
works, comes to stay. Soon he is 

tracking her every move through
the half-open door.

Already it’s too late for them
to know they’ll be caught,

when he is banned
and she is shamed. 

She still wonders what became 
of him without the shelter

of her mother’s wings,
the mothering she offered

then withdrew,
a trick she knew.

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***

Shey Marque: A second skin, a third eye
and the noteworthiness of 4pm on Day 39

(see Mark 4:39 The Calming of the Storm)


i
I walk away from the moon and the warm
air tries to enter me. Sky has never 
been more blue as it tries to enter me. 
I pull down my skin, can’t take in the light, 
can't look the sun in its big blinding eye. 
Down on the pavement, a man’s empty hat,
me with only plastic in my pocket.
Passing shells of shops, I can’t remember 
what was there just a month ago. Today 
still no ceasefire. A man gets on the train 
shouts bitch as he passes me in the aisle 
and I pull down my skin. When I pull up
my mask, a man wearing a child’s backpack 
laughs long and loud, and I pull down my skin.

ii
Yes, this is thirty-nine, Mark, and I’m done
waiting for the command—the wind to run 
out of breath and for the sea to be still,
for calm, for peace—and I pull down my skin.
I watch phone videos. Children are pulled
from under rubble as dusty rag dolls.
A woman who misses her stop chunters
must pay attention, must pay attention,
hitting herself in the face with her hands,
throws her loaded backpack at the window 
of the departing train, and I pull down
my skin. The world is hurting, and I am
just sitting here, just trying to get home,
the carriage unpeopling behind me.

iii
Tiny red-haired bairn on her mother’s lap,
her kick sharp, her soft skin opening mine
as her family beside me stays close.
She’s the same shade of sandstone as a child
in Gaza—that child in the video,
out of the ground, out of the ground they come
and they are forever of the ground, ground
to air their said home, small shufflings of earth
all smoke, all citizen, and bullet and seed,
The tremble of the carriage on the rail,
its soundtrack of heavy machinery,
of building collapse and of eating rocks.
That red-haired girl is touching me again.
I text i'll be home in twenty minutes.

    The quote in part iii is from ‘when they say pledge allegiance, I say’ by Hala Alyan

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***

Annie Wright: Rothko’s Last Room 

Overwhelmed by the sheer scale of Black on Maroon
and unsurprised he turned The Four Seasons project down,
I should go to eat, but in the vaulted silence I can’t move,

try to enter his darkest space. Not getting it, I move
to a closer seat where I sense the closed maroon
curtains of a childhood bedroom, crying on a down

quilt, banished for some misdemeanour. I feel down
into his final desolate months, nothing else but to move
beyond the edge of the canvas where, marooned,

he removed himself, shut down, splattered with maroon.

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***

Rowan Tate: I Suspect That Moths and Regret

share a language no one translates.
Grief has poor timing and excellent posture;

I am learning to walk
without finishing the sentence.

I am not who I meant to become,
but the bread still rises.

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***

Nancy Mattson: Brass pin 

I found it in a biscuit box 
under grit, crumbs, buttons, 
fluff, a lead cow, cat charm,
beads unstrung from their chains, 
a rhinestone from my mother’s 
broken choker. 

Am I a magpie’s daughter, 
my hoard in knots and tangles?
Where did I hide the baby? 
Where is her cradle?
Is she lost in ashes or did she survive, 
severed clean from her mother?

This pearl button is her navel, 
her napa, but where is the cord 
that tied her to me? 

A magpie’s nest is bigger than mine,
I’m a mouse nesting in a pinbox.  
Hiiri for mouse, pieni little.

Come out of your nest, pieni hiiri,
don’t hide from me, my mother whispered. 
I’ve lost her cord of words, the mother hoard,
but not the softness of her voice.

When I dip an old toothbrush in Brasso 
to rub away years of grit from the pin
I hear a soft throaty gold 
from its interlocking pairs 
of cloverleaf lines. 

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***

Fiona Clark: Stone supper

I wish I had my stone licked
and was in bed, he used to say,

my granda, as his granda said
before him, recalling the famine of ’45

when the potato harvest failed,
the Lumpers oozing in the ‘ lazy beds.’ 

A stench rose from the rotting crop,
a black mess, like a month-old corpse.

The mothers boiled a shake of meal,
as each year in the ‘summer hunger’ --

those empty months before
the taters were ready to be tugged --

but now they'd barely a fistful 
of the grit to make a watery gruel,.

They spread the measly paste
on small flat stones to cool,

comforting their children: saying,
‘Now lick your stone and go to bed. ‘

It took some time to lick your stone, 
to try to fool your belly it was full.

                     *******

Now, in Gaza, flames consume
the blackening crust

where orphans starve among the rubble,
choke on a handful of dust.

    Lumpers - a variety of potato; Lazy beds - potato drills; Tugged / togged - harvested.

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***

Cathra Kelliher: Gaza, running

he is running, holding something in his arms
it is his daughter

behind them the house is exploding
she is five

he is running with his daughter in his arms
she is called Ellen

the sniper’s bullet enters his chest
but first

it passes through Ellen’s right hand
where she has reached up 

to cling to him, she has reached up 
over where his heart is

he holds her close, the bullet enters his chest
she is five, their house is exploding

Ellen is right-handed, but she doesn’t
have a right hand anymore, she is five

she doesn’t have a right hand
in the same way that she doesn’t have a father 

it was a clean shot, he was running
their house was exploding

he was holding her in his arms
she is called Ellen

her right hand
is cradling her father’s broken heart

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***

Kathleen McPhilemy: Blow the wind harder

Chucked out of the nest
bare as a human
flies at its eyes
sad walking by

as the gods who are giants
see a child in the road
unfeathered unclothed
know a twinge of distress

but enormous and lofty
when they encounter 
a wreckage of cradles
broken discarded

an expanse of corpses
scattered abroad
where do they walk
where set their feet?

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***

David Goldstein: Flight
for the refugees (after Matthew 2:13-14)

We never hear what happened at the border.
Was Mary strip-searched? Was the child
taken from them? Were they held
in a detention centre? Was there disorder

as placard-waving mobs sought to have them
sent back? Did traffickers and pimps
look on with ill intent? Or were there tents
in rows, water, food, some warmth of welcome?

Was there sympathy for their plight, or 
did they say the massacre was just fake news? 
That they deserved it, being dirty Jews?
That his mistake was in not killing more?

Did they give honour to the baby Jesus
or, scornful, push them back for lack of visas?

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***

B. Anne Adriaens’ work has appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Poetry Ireland Review, Ink Sweat and Tears, Poetry Scotland, and Stand. Her pamphlet Haunt was highly commended in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition 2024

 Tony Beyer continues his writing life in Taranaki, New Zealand. His poems have appeared in many parts of the Anglosphere over the years.

 Anna Bowles has been writing poetry since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Since she began sending it out in early 2024 she has been published in magazines including Magma, Poetry Salzburg, Pennine Platform and Orbis, and has won prizes or been commended in five competitions, including Second Prize in the Edward Thomas Fellowship competition and Third Prize in the Wolverhampton Literary Festival competition.

Fiona Clark is a Suffolk Writer, who had been writing poetry for about five years, and is published in a variety of journals and magazines, such as SPS Twelve Rivers, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Littoral press, @poetrywivenhoe.org, Dreich and several others. She has been commended by Luke Wright for the Crabbe Award , 2025, for her poem “The Lark Trap”, and by Martin Figura for the Norwich Cafe writers award 2024, for her poem, “Prime of a Mediaeval Visionary.” Her poems often focus on female experience throughout history, nature and ecology, and can also have a political edge.

Tim Cunningham is Limerick-born, and has worked in education in Dublin, London, Delaware and Essex and now lives in Westport, County Mayo, in the west of Ireland.  He has had nine poetry collections published since 2001, the most recent being Peristeria .which was launched by Revival Press in April 2023.

Peter Daniels has published four poetry collections, the latest Old Men (Salt, 2024). He has translated Vladislav Khodasévich from Russian (Angel Classics, 2013), and as queer writer in residence at the London Archives wrote the obscene Ballad of Captain Rigby. Website: www.peterdaniels.org.uk

Claudia Daventry has worked as a writer and creative, a translator and a teacher. She was born and lived in London and has relocated fewer times than she’s had hot dinners, but still quite a lot. She last moved from Amsterdam to Scotland where she currently lives and writes, and has various awards and publications to her name, including The Oligarch Loses His Patience from Templar and several libretti commissions working in collaboration with Scottish composer Rory Boyle.

Ger Duffy lives in Co Waterford, Ireland. Her poems are published by PN Review (UK), Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, Southword, Under the Radar (UK), Crannog, Propel (UK) and The North (UK). Her pamphlets were finalists in the Patrick Kavanagh Awards, ThePoetry Business Awards and the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Awards. In 2024, she won the Desmond O’Grady Poetry Award and the Redline Poetry Competition. She is a Pushcart nominee.

Philip Dunkerley lives in Bourne, Lincolnshire, where he runs a local poetry group. He takes part in open-mic readings and other activities whenever he gets the chance. A fair number of his poems have made their way into magazines, webzines and anthologies – London Grip, Magma, Poetry Salzburg, Acumen and IS&T, among others. He reviews for Orbis and has translated poems into English from both Spanish and Portuguese.

S.C. Flynn was born in a small town in Australia. He is of Irish origin and now lives in Dublin. His collections are The Colour of Extinction (Renard Press, October 2024) and An Ocean Called Hope (Downingfield Press, May 2025).

 Lee Fraser grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand, and her full-time occupations have included field linguist and parent. In 2024 she had 22 pieces accepted for publication internationally, and came fourth in the NZ poetry slam. www.leefraserpoetry.com

 Maggie Freeman was born in Trinidad and lives in East London. She writes primary educational books and historical novels as well as poetry, and is currently working on a novella

David Goldstein is a retired counsellor and, hopefully, a developing poet, living in Bristol. He has been writing with the Windmill Hill poetry group since 2017 without whom none of his poems would have been written

Kathleen Gray is a Scottish writer and poet. Her poems and short fiction have been published in anthologies including Reflex Fiction, New Feathers, Drawn to Light, Dreich, and The Alchemy Spoon. She lives in Paris, France.

Jenny Hockey is a Sheffield poet whose work appears in magazines such as The North, The Interpreter’s House and The Frogmore Papers. In 2019 her collection, Going to bed with the moon was published by Oversteps Books

Glen Hunting is currently based in Alice Springs, Central Australia. He writes about estrangement, longing, cultural value, and the difficulty of identifying truth in the age of mass misinformation. He won (jointly) the 2024 Liquid Amber Emerging Poet Prize, and his poems have been published in Plumwood Mountain, Rochford Street Review, Oystercatcher One, Portside Review, and elsewhere.

Cathra Kelliher: lives between London and the Outer Hebrides where she is running an environmental regeneration project. She also works with Restoring Hope, a charity staffed by Jordanian military medics working in mobile units on the ground in Gaza fitting prosthetic limbs to amputees.

 A former journalist who’s lived in six countries, Prue King’s published poetry in various anthologies, most recently Tarot Poetry Journal, Kokako and Fast Fibres. She lives in the luxuriant far north of New Zealand where she’s editing a new anthology of local writers’ work. Find more about Prue at bywords.net@wordpress.com

With 4 collections and a pamphlet behind her, Wendy Klein continues to find homes for poems, wins the odd minor competition and is hoping to have a new pamphlet out before the end of the year, which involves a lot of incantations and crossing fingers.

 Antony Mair has published three collections of poetry. He was awarded first prize in the 2022 Live Canon International Poetry Competition, and was the Poet in Residence for the Cuckmere Pilgrim Path 2023 – 24, leading to publication of a pamphlet, Behind the Seen.

Shey Marque is a poet and former medical scientist living on Whadjuk Noongar country in Perth in Western Australia. Her third poetry collection, The Hum Hearers (UWAP 2025), was shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award and is available at The Hum Hearers – UWA Publishing

Pat Marum was born in Manchester and lives in Northampton. She is widely published in poetry magazines.

Nancy Mattson is a Finnish-Canadian writer who has lived in London for 35 years. Her fourth full poetry collection is Vision on Platform 2 (Shoestring Press, 2018). Her fifth collection is almost imminent.

Kathleen McPhilemy grew up in Belfast but now lives in Oxford. She has published four collections of poetry, the most recent being Back Country, Littoral Press, 2022.  She also hosts a poetry podcast magazine, Poetry Worth Hearing.

Mary Mulholland’s poems are widely published, most recently in Stand, The Pomegranate London, forthcoming in Obsessed with Pipework. She’s collaborated in Poetry Plays, a Louis de Bernière production by Pomegranate London & Theatre Voliere at the Cockpit theatre. She was recently finalist in Winchester, Mslexia and Aesthetica prizes. 

Caleb Murdock was born in 1950 and lives in Rhode Island, U.S.A.  He spent most of his life as a word-processing operator for law firms.  He has written poetry since his twenties but didn’t lose his chronic writer’s block until his mid-sixties. He is now writing up a storm to make up for lost time

Michael O’Brien is a poet, playwright, and songwriter who lives in Chesterfield, New Jersey, U.S., with his wife and daughter. He works as a teacher of young adults on the autistic spectrum and writes in his spare time. 

Thomas Ovans reads more poetry than he writes. It was not always so.

Stuart Pickford lives in Harrogate, and taught in a local comprehensive school. He has three children. His passions include walking, the outdoors, scrambling and trail running. His second collection, Swimming with Jellyfish, was published by Smith/Doorstop.

Kenneth Pobo has a new book out called At The Window, Silence (Fernwood Press).  Forthcoming is Raylene And Skip (Wolfson Press).

Anne Ryland lives in Northumberland. Her third poetry collection, Unruled Journal, was published by Valley Press (2021) and Autumnologist was shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best First Collection. New work has appeared in journals including Long Poem Magazine,Magma,Crannóg and  mpty House Press (US). She was recently awarded first prize in the Second Light Long Poem Competition and longlisted for The Plaza Prose Poetry Prize. https://anneryland.co.uk

Lesley Saunders is the author of several poetry collections, most recently This Thing of Blood & Love (Two Rivers Press 2022) and, with Rebecca Swainston, Days of Wonder (Hippocrates Press 2021), a poetic record of the first year of the Covid pandemic

 Alex Saynor is from Windsor and went to UEA where he took inspiration from being part of W.G.Sebald’s final teaching group. He lives in Wokingham, is Head of English at a school in Slough and has recently been published by Two Rivers Press, Pan Haiku Review, Stroud Football Poets and Wokingham Today. Website: www.wilderspoolcauseway.com

Myra Schneider’s most recent collection is Believing in the Planet, (Poetry Space 2024) Her other publications include books about personal writing. She has had 12 full collections of poetry published and her work has been broadcast on Radio BBC4 and BBC3. She is working on a new collection which will be called The Disappearing. She has co-edited anthologies of poetry by women poets and she has been a poetry tutor for many years.

Rowan Tate is a Romanian creative and curator of beauty. Her writing appears in The Stinging Fly, the Shore, Josephine Quarterly, and Meniscus Literary Journal, among others. She reads nonfiction nature books, the backs of shampoo bottles, and sometimes minds

Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her works include include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time, (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Her collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam was winner of the 2023 Paper Swans Pamphlet Competition and her winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) was published in May 2025.

Julia Vaughan migrated to Australia in 1989, and started writing poetry in 2021 with U3A Surf Coast’s “I Just Don’t Get Poetry” class.  Poetry is her creative, whimsical, stress outlet.

Tim Waller, an American, studies in London and writes about his Southern and Midwestern roots. An elementary Creative Arts teacher, he has been featured at many London venues.  In his spare time, Tim enjoys swimming and bicycling.  

Anthony Wilson is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent of which is The Wind and the Rain (Blue Diode Publishing, 2023). Anthony is also the editor of the anthology Lifesaving Poems (Bloodaxe, 2015).  anthonywilsonpoetry.com

Pushcart Prize-nominated writer Louise Worthington weaves haunting, psychological narratives and emotionally authentic poetry. Find out more about her work here: https://louiseworthington.com/

Judith Wozniak won first prize in the Hippocrates Poetry Competition, 2020. Her two pamphlets, Patient Watching (2022) and Case Notes (2024) are published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press. Her first collection Making Dolmades in Essex is published by VOLE Books (2024).

 Annie Wright’s published in magazines in the UK and USA and was recently published in Italy in English with Italian translations. She leads poetry writing and critiquing workshops and loves performing. Currently working on a 4th collection exploring the folklore of native trees.